Pirates, Passwords, and Policing: Using Technology to Tackle Key Challenges Faced by Streaming Companies

Pirating, password sharing, and policing the exploitation of content consumption are some of the biggest concerns facing streaming media companies today as these challenges are resulting in an immense amount of lost revenues.

Pirating has always been an issue, especially where the value of content is high, for instance with live sports or the latest film release. Traditional methods of tackling this, such as through Digital Rights Management (DRM) and watermarking have some effect. But as the old saying goes, ‘where there is a will there's a way’, and for some time now bad actors have been able to break or circumnavigate traditional levels of security. Let’s face it, these security methods have been around for a long time and very little has changed in their ability to stop pirating.

Watermarking has a strong capability of tracking, tracing, and active monitoring. While some pirate services have been taken down through active monitoring, bad actors are relentless and will have servers ready to spin up at a moment's notice. This means as soon as one service is taken down, another one will be set up.

Importantly, watermarking does not immediately stop the pirate service streaming, which means lost revenues for the targeted legal streamers (who have paid significant money for the rights).Illegal streaming of films, for example, grew 38.6% between 2021 and 2022 according to London based piracy research firm Muso TNT. While visits to ‘free’ streaming sites rose by nearly 9%. The same can be said in the live sports market according to the UK Government body, the Intellectual Property Office produced their latest edition of the Online Copyright Infringement Tracker. Their report showed that in the UK alone there was a 36% overall infringement rate and despite relentless campaigns 3.9 million people accessed illegal sports streams.

The Anti Piracy coalition group, A.C.E. (Alliance for Creative and Entertainment), which consists of 53 major media players, cites that piracy eats away at $28 billion in broadcasters annual revenues.

“Piracy eats away at $28 billion in broadcasters annual revenues.”

Another area of lost revenues is password sharing. Streaming media company Netflix announced a clampdown on such practices and are looking to introduce their one household policy, where a family can use Netflix wherever they are – at home, on the go or on holiday. If you do share passwords on Netflix there will now be a fee and of course, a limitation on that usage. This clampdown was born out of Netflix seeing 100+ million non paying households using their service via password sharing. Other streaming platforms are following suit too. They are in their right by doing so, as often unwittingly, people are unaware that such practices are in effect infringements of copyright.

At the same time Netflix has introduced bolt-ons to their packages, allowing users to add viewers to their subscriptions at a smaller cost, discouraging widespread password sharing.

Discouraging breaching of copyright law by adding new features or managing pricing is another important side of fighting password sharing. Because although streaming service owners can pursue legal cases against offenders, the PR impact and potential backlash may deter them from taking such actions.

In addition to this, there is the grey area with regards to groups, gatherings, and what is considered commercial viewing. For example, if you live in an apartment block and are fortunate to have a residents’ cinema to view your streaming service with other residents, this could in fact be breaching copyright law as this is considered as commercial streaming, even if it isn’t for financial gain. The same can be said for chartered yachts, in which a commercial streaming licence is required (the same type of licence a commercial airliner would require).

Policing all these areas is quite a difficult task, but as revenues get tighter and margins get thinner, broadcasters are looking at ways of reducing these leakages.

Our R&D team at Vodworks is actively exploring the various touch points that pirates, bad actors and simply the naïve are exploiting. We are working together with a number of media companies, pursuing the application of Web 3.0 and Trusted Ledger technology in conjunction with traditional methods like DRM and Watermarking to find alternative ways of being able to address these issues and enhance security without losing user experience.

If you and your business are eager to join us in finding new ways to tackle the challenges facing the content streaming business today, reach out to Team Vodworks to discuss.